Relational Subsets Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Retinal Diseases Recognition
This addresses the challenge of imbalanced learning for rare retinal diseases in medical screening, though it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge distillation and subset methods.
The study tackled the problem of long-tailed data distribution in medical datasets for retinal disease recognition by proposing a class subset learning framework that divides data into subsets based on prior knowledge and uses weighted knowledge distillation from multiple teacher models, achieving significant improvements when integrated with state-of-the-art techniques on two datasets.
In the real world, medical datasets often exhibit a long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy most of the data, while most classes have rarely few samples), which results in a challenging imbalance learning scenario. For example, there are estimated more than 40 different kinds of retinal diseases with variable morbidity, however with more than 30+ conditions are very rare from the global patient cohorts, which results in a typical long-tailed learning problem for deep learning-based screening models. In this study, we propose class subset learning by dividing the long-tailed data into multiple class subsets according to prior knowledge, such as regions and phenotype information. It enforces the model to focus on learning the subset-specific knowledge. More specifically, there are some relational classes that reside in the fixed retinal regions, or some common pathological features are observed in both the majority and minority conditions. With those subsets learnt teacher models, then we are able to distill the multiple teacher models into a unified model with weighted knowledge distillation loss. The proposed framework proved to be effective for the long-tailed retinal diseases recognition task. The experimental results on two different datasets demonstrate that our method is flexible and can be easily plugged into many other state-of-the-art techniques with significant improvements.